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The Augusta News-Review - April 5, 1980 -
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Mallory K. Millender Editor-Publisher
Paul D. Walker Special Assistant to the Publisher
Frank Bowman Director of Special Projects
Ms. Fannie FlonoNews-Editor
Billy W. Hobbsßeporter
Ms. Mary BoyntonAdvertising Manager
Harvey Harrison Sales Representative
Mrs. Rhonda Brown Administrative Assistant
Mrs. Mary Gordon Administrative Assistant
Mrs. Geneva Y. Gibson Church Coordinator
Mrs. Fannie Johnson Aiken County Correspondent
Mrs. Clara WestMcDuffie County Correspondent
David DupreeSports Editor
Mrs. Been Buchanan Fashion & Beauty Editor
Roosevelt Green Columnist
Al Irby.Columnist
Mrs. Marian Waring Columnist
Philip Waring Columnist
Sterling Wimberly ‘Photographer
Roscoe Williams Photographer
We cannot be responsible for unsolicited photos, manuscripts, and other materials.
Mailing Address
Box 953 (USPS 887 820) - Augusta, Ga.
Phone (404) 722-4555
Second Class Postage Paid Augusta, Ga. 30903 li IB 1V
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by Black Press
Today’s column hails the anniversary
of the Black Press. As you know, the
black church, founded shortly after the
American War of Independence and the
Black Press bom in March of 1827, are
our two oldest and most important
institutions. Both have aided our race and
nation.
The NAACP and the Black Press have
been foremost is making our nation
realize the potential of our Constitution
and related laws. The press has
courageously worked for the actual
survival of our people. Down through the
years it has continued to bind our
community through self examination,
self-determination, agitation for that
i which is right, a belief in God and
j educational programs for the
advancement of the race and community.
While supporting two world wars, the sale
of war bonds and backing national
defense, our press spotlighted
ill-treatment of black servicemen, coupled
with the non-use of their parents in
national defense industries and in the
combat arms of our military forces. It has
waged an unceasing battle against
segregation, racial discrimination and
racism.
Today also starts a three-part column
which will include: (1) a salute to the 153
birthday of the Black Press, (2) a brief
look at the history, structure and
program services of various papers around
the nation. We will note advances by
black-owned print and electronic media,
(3) a special glance will be made at
Georgia and Augusta publications since
the Civil War era, (4) a continuation of
our March 31, 1979 feature on why the
News-Review should have continued and
expanded support, and lastly, (5) this
series, over six months in research, will
incorporate my personal experiences,
participation and contacts with the Black
Press and allied communications
resources over the past 50 years.
The basis of my research includes: The
NNPA Sesqukentennial Black Press
Handbook, 1977; “Black Perspectives on
the Bicentennial” published by the
National Urban League, 1976; Dr. John
Dittmer’s “Black Georgia in the
Progressive Era, 1900-1920”; coupled
with examination of several old
publications and interviews with civic
leaders in four states where I’ve worked.
Nor should I forget a special one with the
late Dr. Channing H. Tobias and his
reflections on Rev. William J. White and
the Georgia Baptist in Augusta.
SALUTE TO REV. WHITAKER
May this short presentation bring a
long overdue salute to the service and
Wants beauty
feature resumed
Dear Editor:
I just read with pride Dr. Whitney’s
article on black Air Force pilots during
World War 11. It was very good, indeed.
You should also know that your paper
has many strong supporters here in
Detroit Land. May I compliment you on
a splendid paper.
Those of us former Augustans miss
Mrs. Geneva Gibson, but are happy she
elected to return to her home for
retirement. We all enjoy the fine religious
section she has developed in the paper.
Our regards to her.
Philip Waring’s writings are tops
because he runs up and down the
By Philip Waring
leadership of the Rev. M.J. Whitaker. He
founded the now defunct Weekly Review
in 1947. And owned and edited it as a
high level publication for 17 years until
he sold it in 1964.
Its birth came at the right time as
Augusta had not had, in the opinion of
this writer, a good, ongoing black paper
in over two decades. The Great
Depression (1929-41) and World War II
(1941-45) were behind us. Federal courts
had outlawed the White Primary and the
awesome power of the Cracker Party
(which helped disenfranchise blacks) was
largely gone. Black boys and girls
returned home after fighting and bleeding
in an overseas war to protect this
republic. They were ready to exercise the
franchise, vote and run for public office.
Yes, the 1947 birth of the Weekly Review
was timely indeed.
SUPPORT FOR W.C. ERVIN
The paper supported Frank
Summerfield in his quest for election to
the Augusta city council. While he lost
the election, our good solid old timers
such as L.B. Wallace, Rep. R.A. Dent and
Dr. Ike Washington still hold doubts
about the fairness of that election count.
Next came the race for a seat on the
Board of Education by W.C. Ervin, Paine
College Business Manager. Business
executive L.B. Wallace, campaign
manager, brought together a coalition of
some 30 black groups in support. The
Weekly Review’s Vol. 5 No. 43 edition
dated October 31, 1952, contained a
front page feature backing W.C. Ervin.
His two-to-one victory marked the first
time a black had won public office in the
Southeast and was hailed around the
nation. What happened? After the
Summerfield and Ervin campaigns, the
General Assembly instituted at-large in
place of district voting.
The paper took a strong stand against
the county unit system in Georgia and
helped defeat it. The grip of small rural
counties had at last been broken. The
Weekly Review applauded the U.S.
Supreme Court 1954 decision on
education and was criticized locally in
many sectors. Rev. Whitaker indicated
that his office was visited three times by
the local FBI and his files taken away. No
charges were ever raised against him or
the paper. (Scores of civil rights groups
and black media in other parts of the
nation also experienced similar
treatment.)
Despite these set backs, the Weekly
Review won two national awards during
the mid-1950s for news excellence from
the Freedom Foundation at Valley Forge,
Pa. More next week.
Letter to the Editor
keyboard in Augusta, Negro history with
names, various places and black history
events. It’s good he came home rather
than remaining in St. Louis.
Comparing back issues with the
present, I note the paper no longer carries
“Beauty of the Week” thereby denying
opportunity for us here in Detroit to see
the grandchildren of our former
schoolmates. Can you resume it?
All best wishes to friends in Augusta.
Willie Louis Red
18501 St. Aubins
Detroit, Michigan 48234
Page 4
||?lil-iIBM \
TAKE HOME PAY?
—— To be equal 1
B Balanced budgets
or balanced lives
■■■■■*■■■■■■■■■■■■■ By Vernon E. Jordan
Balance-the-budget hysteria is sweeping
the country. The Administration, which
first submitted an austere budget
amounting to a real decrease in social
program spending, tore it up and came up
with a newer, even more austere budget.
This one takes the hatchet to programs
that primarily benefit poor people.
Instead of giving the poor job programs,
welfare reform, ane expanded necessary
services, the new budget gives them MX
missiles.
It’s all in the name of fighting
inflation. But the budget doesn’t fight
inflation at all. You can travel the length
and breadth of this nation and not come
up with a single economist who believes a
balanced budget will shave more than an
insignificant fraction of a percentage
point off the inflation rate.
A good part of the inflation rate is the
result of OPEC increases for oil. The
planned ten-cent-a-gallon tax on gas will
just force a few more poor people off the
roads while actually fueling inflation
through higher gas prices.
It’s too small to conserve energy and
too big to do anything but harm poor
people. If the Administration is serius
about limiting gas imports it would
impose a rationing system that allocated
gas through transferable coupons and put
a firm lid on imports.
The rest of the balanced budget
program is similarly concerned with
symbols rather than substance. There’s no
serious effort to get a handle on big ticket
spending items. Defense spending is still
scheduled to rise.
But social programs and urban aid are
slated to be trimmed. This is less an effort
to balance the budget than it is a move to
pander to an electorate perceived as being
fiscally conservative.
Everyone wants to eliminate budget
deficits - so long as the other guy pays
for it. The budget becomes a political
instrument and the politically powerful
get to keep their tax loopholes and
favorite programs while the cities and the
Tax Tip
dHM If you sell
for a profit
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By Be 0131(1 J 0(1(18 OU
Normally, taxpayers who sell their
home for a substantial profit face a heavy
tax load, but this burden can be avoided.
If you buy another home that costs as
much or more than the sale price of the
old one, within a specified time, the
profit from the sale is not included in
your taxable income.
The second home must’be bought and
occupied within a period ending 18
months after the sale. A two-year period
is permitted when building a new home.
This tax deferment applies only to the
sale of a home which is the family’s main
residence.
poor are cut.
For all the rhetoric about how we all
must make sacrifices, the sacrifices are
concentrated disproportionately among
those who depend most on federal
programs.
Black unemployment is actually about
twenty percent and black youth
joblessness is about sixty percent in some
cities. But job creation and training
programs become the priority target for
the budget cuts.
Those cuts have been justified as a
signal to the international financial
community that the United States is
finally serious aboutcontrolling inflation.
There’s talk about giving the bond market
a psychological lift.
Black people and poor people have
always been asked to make sacrifices.
They’ve borne the burden of wars,
depressions, recessions, and now,
inflation.
But this may be the first time in
history that poor people have been asked
to make sacrifices to give a psychological
lift to the bond market!
I’m all for real steps to get a handle on
inflation. The problem of escalating
prices hits the poor badly - costs of
survival necessities that take up the bulk
of most low and moderate income
families budgets are rising twice as fast as
other costs.
But it can’t be done with mirrors, or
by making cosmetic budget cuts that
force inflation-ridden working people
into unemployment. Nor can it be done
by following outmoded economic
theories that mandate recession as a cure
for inflation.
We need to spur productivity and get
this nation back on the road of producing
good and services the world will buy.
Inflation can’t be licked by driving the
people on the bottom rung of the
economic ladder deeper into poverty.
The budget cuts won’t prevent
economic bankruptcy, but they take us a
long way to moral bankruptcy.
When figuring the amount of gain for
which tax may be postponed you may
deduct /or “fix-up” expenses if they were
accomplished within 90 days prior to the
sale, and paid for no later than 30 days
after the * sale. Check with your
accountant or the IRS on details if this
matter affects you. It could be well worth
your while.
At age 55, you qualify for the big
bonanza -a one-time SIOO,OOO exlusion
of capital gain from the sale of your
principal residence. This latest change is
retroactive to July 26,1978.
Walking with dignity
Blacks and
half-blacks
By Al Irby 111 - .-t™
The system of separate political rights
that the government has tried for more
than 10 years to force on the nearly 4
million colored people in South Africa
has collapsed in ruins. This is just the
latest, perhaps most dramatic illustration
of worsening relations between the two
groups in Cape Town.
ALL INJUSTICES WILL BOOMERANG
For generations the whites and
coloreds - people of racially mixed
descents who are considered closest to
the whites in terms of culture and
economic standing - have lived together
amicably. They share the same religion
and predominantly Afrikaans cultural
background. Many so-called colored
families have even had brothers and
sisters who live as “whites.”
But today, bitterness over the way
they have been treated has turned many
colored people against the whites
altogether. They are especially upset at
being deprived of the vote more than a
decade ago and at the way many
thousands of them have been forced to
leave their homes to make way for whites
because of rigid residential segregation
laws.
MULATTOES ARE THREATENING
Now even many of their more
moderate political leaders are talking of
throwing in their lot with the blacks
against the whites; they should have been
all along. Tentative political links have
been formed already. Young colored
people, particularly, are going out of their
way to emphasize their links with blacks
rather than whites. Originally the colored
people had limited voting rights in the
now whites-only Parliament. But many in
the National Party opposed this as
“interference” in “white affairs.”
THOUGHT THEY HAD IT MADE
After some dubious political
Tony Brown Comments
4 No, not one,’
GM racist battle cry
President Carter’s Georgia Democratic
presidential primary campaign buried
Senator Ted Kennedy and revived a
celebrated segregation battle cry: “No,
not one.”
His supporters claimed it was an
innocent mistake. You almost want to
believe them. After all, with opposition
like Jerry Brown, the rock guru, and Ted
Kennedy, the Chappaqquiddick bumbler,
anybody would look good.
But there is too much suggested racist
behavior in Jimmy Carter’s past to
overlook his new slogan which
historically refers to the one coined by
former Gov. Ernest Vandiver, a staunch
segregationist. “No, not one” was a white
supremist pledge to keep blacks out of
Georgia’s public schools.
Atlanta attorney Pitts Carr linked the
phrase to Andy Young’s political
mentor’s past. “The use of this tawdry
and objectionable slogan is just one more
of so many obvious indications of the
incredible insensitivity of the Carter
people toward the feelings of black
Americans.”
While Carr, Ralph Abernathy and
Julian Bond were critical of the slogan on
Kennedy’s political behalf, there is much
history to suggest that they are
fundamentally correct. “Any black
Georgian... would be voting against the
interests of his own people,” Bond
warned.
While Kennedy doesn’t deserve the
strong support he received from blacks in
Georgia and elsewhere, neither does
Carter. And if it weren’t for permanent
political opportunists such as Rev. King
Sr., Corretta King and Andy Young
wrapping Carter’s image in “we shall
overcome” more blacks would know of
Carter’s racist past.
In 1970, running an uphill battle
against the incumbent moderate Gov. Carl
Sanders in Georgia, Carter’s “stink tank,”
it was called down home, reproduced and
circulated a picture of Carl Sanders
celebrating a basketball victory while two
black Atlanta Hawks basketball players
poured champagne over his head. The
operation could have been called “the
making of a nigger lover.” The leaflet was
mailed to the white Baptist preachers and
barber shops -- ananymously.
After Andy Young stumped in the
black North for the unknown Carter, his
message was that Carter was less racist
than Gerald Ford. It wasn’t much of a
maneuvers, the half-whites were
disenfranchised. Instead, they were.given
a segregated so-called “legislative council”
that was supposed to administer their
own affairs separately. Goody, goody for
them! They should have been with the
blacks all the time. In the first elections
in 1969, the government packed the
mixed council with mulatto “Uncle
Toms.”
In later years, elected members are
named to the sub-council. Eventually, the
colored members were elected directly to
the council. They will, in short, forge a
majority. Elected members vowed to
force the government to shut the “Jim
Crow” council down. That has been
done, with the ■ government
acknowledging that the colored
politicians in the council had managed to
“make a mockery” of the place. Instead,
the government has announced it will set
up a body called the Colored Persons
Council. It will consist of colored
appointed members to advise the
government.
THE MULTATTOS AND ASIANS
Colored political leaders have dismissed
the scheme as a transparent political
fraud. And the government itself is
apologetic, emphasizing that it is only a
“temporary” measure and that something
better will be provided when a
commission investigating proposals for a
fairer political dispensation for all races
comes up with its report. But that is
likely to take a long time.
Meanwhile, even white Afrikaaners
who support the National Party are
becoming increasingly concerned about
the way relations between the whites and
colored people appear to be deteriorating.
Opposition politicians of all races see this
as further proof that the ruling white
National Party has no acceptable political
blueprint for the country.
choise, but blacks’ blind allegiance to
Democrats never offers anything else.
Then came Carter’s “ethnic purity”
fiasco. Carter apologized and blacks gave
him the benefit of the doubt, especially
since they had been indoctrinated into
“less racism” politics. He got the black
vote in Georgia by merely hanging a
portrait of Martin Luther King in the
Georgia Capitol. Fooling blacks - with a
little help from his friends -- was getting
easier all of the time.
His black centerpiece of political
treachery is to tell blacks that he would
“rather die than betray your trust in me”
is only matched by his promise to the
black college presidents that black
colleges would be better off when he
leaves office than when he took office.
HEW is wrecking them daily.
It’s only history repeating itself.
Carter’s first government job was as a
member of the Sumter County School
Board in 1956. Carter proposed a motion
that subsequently moved the land site of
a black school to please white parents and
kept black children from walking down
the same street as white children as they
went to their respective segregated
schools. He also voted for a proposal to
take sick-leave funds, and use them for a
raise for whites and not for blacks.
In 1970, the self-made liberal described
himself as a “red-neck” when running for
governor against a moderate Carl Sanders.
Allegedly, Carter boasted of winning
“without a single black vote.” His slogan
was, “Isn’t It Time Somebody Spoke Up
For You?” Guess who he was “speaking
up” for?
The segregationist former Georgia
Governor Marvin Griffin endorsed him
and you can believe that his trip to a
private white-only academy in Atlanta to
“support private education” helped win
that endorsement. The White Citizens
Council of Georgia endorsed Carter in the
Augusta Courier where blacks were
routinely called “niggers.”
I guess the temptation to remind the
good old boys back home of the good old
days when Carter copied a replica of a
George Wallace slogan was too
overwhelming. When enough blacks see
past the house servants, it may be “no,
not one” - Black vote.
Tony Brown’s Journal, the television
series, is shown every Sunday on
WRDW-12at 1 pan.